


Rainbow Veins

by AgentJX7



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Crushes, F/F, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Humanstuck, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Requited Unrequited Love, Serious Injuries, Slow Build, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 16:40:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7230388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgentJX7/pseuds/AgentJX7
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat Vantas does not want to move to Raintown, MA. He does not want to befriend the locals of said town. And he most certainly does not want to get involved in all of their relationship drama.</p><p>Tough luck, kid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rainbow Veins

It was always raining. Karkat Vantas despised the very idea of moving to Raintown, but his dad insisted. His father had found a job there, and his brother would be attending a school close by, so he had to go too. Everything he loved was in Springfield. His school, his cousin Gamzee, people who actually liked the St. Louis Cardinals, Terezi. Oh my god, Terezi. He would be leaving her. And even though they weren’t dating, per se, the idea of losing what he almost had was devastating. His father and brother were both telling him to move on, that he’d make new friends, but he didn’t WANT any new friends. He just wanted to stay there.

Raintown, Massachusetts, is at the center of a curious phenomenon. Due to freak pressure conditions, it almost never stops raining. It is also around 1,100 miles from Springfield, Illinois. 1,104 lonely miles separate Karkat Vantas’s new house from the location of Terezi Pyrope’s house. 

The drive was long and boring. Kankri sat in the front, rapid-fire messaging with someone or another who he had met at the orientation for his colledge. His father drove and consumed around a metric ton of coffee. Karkat mostly sat in the back and played games, but eventually his DS died, and he fell slowly asleep.

The people of the city of Raintown buy, collectively, more colored lights than the people in any other city in America. They even exceed the residents of Christmas, Florida.

Karkat’s first impression of the town was gloomy. Rather, the rural area around the town seemed gloomy. The sky slowly faded to a steely grey, and a light drizzle began to fall. He awoke as they entered the suburbs. It was not a gradual change. One moment, the houses were almost miles apart, and then the town began in a matter of seconds. Karkat thought the town of Creekbridge, where they were now passing, seemed gloomy too. They left Creekbridge, and after a few more lightly-housed miles, they were there.

There were quite a few people around the outer edge of town. The rain was still falling, but the people seemed strangely happy. Dad stopped once to ask for directions, but Kankri and Karkat were too busy being confused to notice. Why were there so many people? It was coming down in _sheets!_ And the people were all smiling, too. Their dad pulled out and continued the drive. There were hardly any cars on the road, but there were lots of pedestrians, all with brightly colored umbrellas and rain gear on. This town just kept getting weirder and weirder. And just when he thought it couldn’t possibly get any stranger, they pulled off Main Street.

The city of Raintown is built in an extraordinary way. Due to the natural incline of the hill that the city is built on, houses are often pushed together, back-to-back. There is still a small space between the houses, of course, but in some spots the roofs nearly touch. Karkat Vantas’ house is one such house.

The houses nearly touched. Why anyone would build them that way escaped him. How was another question. And then there were the lights. Karkat had put them off as a business trick on main street, but they were everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of brightly colored lights. This was getting ridiculous. By anyone’s reasoning, this town should be a gloomy waste. But these people seemed full of life. Karkat reached the conclusion that all the people in the town were high. This conclusion was hastily abandoned, and replaced with the conclusion that the entire town was idiots. This seemed much more likely. 

As the car pulled into the drive, the eldest Vantas began to rattle off the floor plan.  
“Alright, guys, we’re here! My office and room are downstairs. Kankri, you’re upstairs on the right, and Karkat’s on the left. Your beds should already be in there, but you’ve still got a lot of unpacking to do. Hop to it!” Karkat’s father was an extraordinarily positive person. Others had compared him to a living version of Chris Traeger. Unfortunately, Karkat did not share this mentality.

Kankri bounded out of the car, probably eager to get back to whatever stupid conversation he was having. Karkat slouched slowly inside.

The house was nice. Karkat hated to admit it, but he liked it. The hardwood smelled slightly of pine, and the place was done in pastel blues and greens. Still, it was a thousand miles from where Terezi was, and that was bad. It was a long house, the first floor divided into the kitchen and the dining room. He trudged up the stairs, and found (to his extreme displeasure) that the upper floor was almost as hard to dislike as the lower floor. There was an open area in between his room and Kankri’s, which held a sofa and a small TV. His room was longish, and the roof slanted down toward the end. A small window jutted out near the middle. He figured it would be a good place to message some of his old friends. As he slumped onto the ledge by the window, he glanced out, across the miniscule gap between his house and the one behind it, and directly into the room of Nepeta Leijon, who was currently in the process of pulling her shirt on over her head.

In the moments after his brain shorted out, Karkat found it hard to process what had just happened. There was apparently a house practically on top of his, and the window directly across from his seemed to look in on a girl’s room. Slowly, he stood up. The girl in the other window was laughing uncontrollably. There was a small awning above her window, and it extended out over the overhang. The overhang itself was around eight feet square, with a small division running down the middle between the houses. Karkat rolled his eyes at the girl. It wasn’t really that funny. She was writing something now. A moment later she pressed a note to the window that said “open your window!” and then a smiley face. Karkat hesitantly slid open his window. 

“Hi!” The girl shouted. Karkat hoped she wasn’t going to- “So, d’ya need a picture, or…” she burst out laughing again. Karkat groaned. 

“Thank you for the intelligent conversation. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some business to attend to that isn’t costing me brain cells by the second. Goodbye.” He began to close the window.

“Hey, hang on a second. Who’re you?” Something made Karkat hesitate. 

“Karkat Vantas. And you?”

“Nepeta Leijon.”

“Well, not pleased to meet you, Miss Ley-owhnn.” Karkat took a good look at her for the first time. She was undeniably pretty. She had short, brownish-gold hair, deep green eyes, and a cute face. This was somehow accented by the weird blue cat hat she was wearing. He was finding it harder to hate her than the house, which was saying something. 

“Ha ha, furry funny.” Was that a cat pun? “Now, Mr. Fan-tas-” Oh, she did that on purpose- “what brings you here?” 

“A car.” Karkat gave her a look that would have been more than enough to derail less positive people than Nepeta.

“Pfft-” she snickered. “You’re a funny purrson, Karkitty.”

Karkat’s head had never snapped up so quickly in his life. “What? D-did you just call me?”

“Oh,” she blushed sheepishly. “Sorry, I just-”

“N-no. It’s fine. Really.” What were the odds of her hitting on Terezi’s old pet name for him on her first try?

“S’really fine. If it bothers you, I can stop.” She shrugged. “I tend to accidentally make cat puns when I talk. They just kinda… slip out. And your name fits really well.”

“No, you’re good. It just reminded me of someone I used to know.” 

There was a physical silence. A physical silence, of course, is when conversation ceases because all parties involved have run out of things to say. This kind of silence is especially awkward, as it must be ended consciously with the introduction of a new topic of conversation. To make things worse, this kind of silence tends to happen in only two contexts: first meetings, and family holiday reunions featuring relatives that you haven’t seen since you were six.

“So!” Nepeta said suddenly. “You’re new in town.”

“Brilliant observation.” Karkat let out a mental sigh of relief that at least she was talking again. 

“Ha ha. I mean I need to introduce you to everyone. Do you have an umbrella?”

“I just moved to the rainiest place on Earth. So no. Of course not.”

“Good." She caught his sarcasm and threw it back in his face without a second thought. "Get it and come to Main Street. There’s a cafe there called Cafe Via Roma. Meet me there in an hour!” Nepeta smiled.

Statistics rarely make sense. However, it is worth noting that Raintown has the lowest ratio of singles arriving in the town to people single after one year.


End file.
